Linux has a rich set of commands for manipulating and accessing files. The du utility gives information on disk usage, and the sort utility can sort the results. Finally, we can run those results through the head command, which gives you the top 10 lines outputted through any other command. We’ll chain the commands together to get the output that we want.

Have you ever used a tail -f on a logfile, only to find that it’s scrolling by way too fast for you to deal with? If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can always grep the contents, but often you aren’t sure what you need to see. In this case, it’s useful to reverse grep instead.

If you can’t stand the automatic hyperlinking in Microsoft Word, you might be hard-pressed to find the right place to disable it in Office 2007, since all the settings are hidden so well compared to previous versions.

If you’ve moved an Ubuntu virtual machine or modified it and then suddenly had a problem getting networking to work, you might want to read through this page, because I’ve figured out a workaround to get it working again.

If you are getting this error then you probably reset the permissions on your hidden .ssh directory in your user folder, and your keys aren’t going to work anymore. It’s very important that these files not be writable by just anybody with a login to the box, so openssh will give you an error if you try to use them.

If you want to “map a drive” from a Linux computer to a shared folder on a Windows computer or a shared folder on a Linux computer running Samba, there’s a simple way that you can do this from the command line.

If you use the rsync utility to keep your backups synchronized from your database server over to your backup or secondary file server, you might want to prevent the script from using too much bandwidth. Here’s how.

Like anything else on Linux, it’s easiest to do things from the command line, and when we’re dealing with servers that’s probably the only thing we easily have access to. Luckily it’s trivial to mount an ISO image in Linux.

GEEK TRIVIA

DID YOU KNOW?

Despite the widespread belief that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis, no scientific studies have successfully supported that hypothesis; the cracking sound is, in fact, not caused by your bones or joints actually cracking, but by the bursting of small bubbles of gasses built up in synovial fluid (a thick lubricating fluid between the joints).